Roddy Woomble on The Deluder

It's the day after Roddy Woomble's birthday when The Skinny catches up with the Edinburgh native. He's at home in the Hebrides, having spent an uneventful day mostly reading rather than celebrating. He's less keen on birthdays the more he has, but is content with the peaceful island life he's built. He's now been involved in writing and performing for more than half of his life, with two successful concurrent musical paths in Idlewild and the output under his own name. “I don't really think of myself as a solo artist and I never really have done,” he states. His new record, The Deluder, is very much a group effort, one that comes from a well-established collective of impressive musicians.

This album should also help to quash the folk label that's often tagged on to much of Woomble's work, something he's always found odd. “I don't really like folk music... I always find it weird when I'm called a folk musician,” he admits. “I'm not really wild on singer-songwriters. I always found it quite strange that that's what people saw me as. People still find it surprising that it's not just me sitting on a stool playing acoustic guitar, emoting. It's me with a five-piece band doing quite interesting music. That's still something that we're trying to get away from; trying to get people to realise that it's quite a different thing from what they expect.”

It's over a decade since Woomble's first release under his own name and this album is a world away from his debut. “The Deluder sounds like a different recording artist if you listen to that against My Secret is My Silence,” he suggests. It has a much more minimalist, spacious feel, infusing elements of jazz and unconventional sounds and melodies. Some of the tracks on the album were initially written with Idlewild in mind, but were deemed more atmospherically applicable to the other project. “We were trying not to make it this big full thing... using those [available] elements and that's what's really good about minimalism in any form of art,” he tells us. “If you don't have access to red or yellow, you just have to paint with the other colours, and that can make a really interesting painting too. Similarly with music, that's the way we were approaching it.”

The Deluder is perhaps a little more introspective and slightly darker than previous efforts. Woomble's vocal is comfortingly familiar, though richer with time and age, but sonically the songs reveal innovative textures and concepts on repeat listens. “I really love electronic music and I was really keen to get an element of that without it sounding like me trying to go into a genre that I'm not really known for or comfortable in.”

Woomble has been in the Hebrides for most of the time he's been releasing music under his own name. Undoubtedly this will have influenced his music and lyrics, but he certainly doesn't feel remote or removed from the world, with regular touring a large part of his life. “I prefer not to be surrounded by people and that's why I live where I live. And that's not because I don't like people, it's because I spent 15 years living in big cities and I just kind of got fed up of it. It's natural to change as you get older.”

He enjoys feeling tucked away from the rest of the world, but wouldn't rule out a change in the future. “I remember having a conversation with [the poet] Edwin Morgan about that, because he lived in Loch Tummel for years and around that time I couldn't believe why you'd want to move back from this beautiful spot to Anniesland [in Glasgow] where he lived. And he was like 'As I got older I wanted to be surrounded by life, by young people, by things going on'. It's a very natural thing to get to a point in your life when you want to escape that but it's also probably quite a natural thing when you want that back in your life.”

The Deluder will take the band on an extensive tour of the UK and Ireland, with some dates in Europe where he hasn't been before with the solo group. He says that Idlewild didn't have much success in Europe, suggesting that being signed to a major label was detrimental. “A noisy, slightly off-kilter band from Scotland were just kind of getting lost… we would have been much better off being on an independent label,” he reflects. “I often thought that about Idlewild, but I don't have regrets. Particularly in America as well, we probably would have done quite well if we'd have been signed to an independent.”

Woomble is constantly evolving as an artist in both bands, not wanting to rehash the past or become a sort of nostalgia act. “[Idlewild] had a moment when the average man on the street would whistle our song, but largely we've existed for music fans and that's a nice place to be,” he says. “The general vibe towards the band was really positive [with the last Idlewild record]. Hopefully I'm going to find that with this solo record too. What I'm hoping is that I can find people that haven't listened to me before, and similarly with the next Idlewild record, we'll hope that there will be a whole new group of people that will be ready to listen to the band.”